Rex Kerr
3 min readOct 8, 2022

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This is a spectacular analysis (er…or so I thought)! (Edit: I have since reviewed modern economics literature and found that many of the criticisms are no longer true, though they were (more) true when I formed my opinions of the state of economics, post-review I think many claims require much more justification if they are to be treated as currently the case as opposed to a historical analysis.)

I found only one smallish thing that seems left out, and one smallish thing that seems overstated. (Edit: and one BIG thing missing!)

Left out: in addition to the overall "yes/no/in-between" question for the field as a whole, and the "more/less" for individual researchers, there are different results from economics that are more or less scientific (in that they're empirically suppoted). For example, the supply and demand curves are a pretty reasonable approximation under certain conditions, just like Newton's laws of motion are. Yes, fine, you don't normally drop balls in a vacuum, but you still get a lot of insight into the actual behavior from the idealized behavior. On the other end, getting Pareto-efficiency in a free market seems so roundly disproved that I'm not sure why people talk about it any more. (Also, the notion of Pareto-efficiency has problems.)

Overstated: that you can't approach things a heck of a lot more rigorously than economists normally do because of the vagueries of human motivation. In fact, behavioral psychologists quantify human motivation all the time when they're careful, it works remarkably well (which is to say, not very well, but way better than the can't-do-science disaster that one might intuitively predict). Indeed, economists sometimes notice this and get Nobel prizes for trying to quantify something that they should have been quantifying for decades (while continuing not to quantify other things that they could and should have been quantifying for decades). For instance, Richard Thaler won the Nobel Prize for incorporating the idea of social preferences and lack of behavioral control into economics. Um. Duh? Don't economists watch ads for, like, Coca Cola and stuff? And we're still waiting on good theories of limited information and attention and how that interacts with Thaler-type analysis. So, though you did admit some possibility that economists can conduct themselves scientifically, I think you also overstated the impossibility. It's merely quite hard; humans do act in predictable ways given context and culture, and you can study that (and explore the bounds of known contexts and cultures) if you want to.

(Edit: the big thing missing is a review of the modern economics literature to demonstrate clearly that the charges leveled here remain true. In my cursory survey of the top h-scored economists’ most recent papers, the charges were largely not true, though it seems to me that this is a relatively recent (< 2 decades) phenomenon which may still be working through the field. Still, it is important to criticize the current state of affairs rather than attacking a historical standard that has already been left behind in part for the very reasons mentioned.)

But these are minor quibbles (edit: except for the big one); overall this is a spectacular analysis of why economics is (edit: or was) as much social pseudoscience as social science. (A longer version would benefit from more specific examples e.g. about the contrasting politically-convenient economic views held by different economists to drive home the point that people really don't seem to be challenging their most cherished hypotheses--but this version is already pretty long for a Medium article! Edit — given contemporary trends in economics that I’ve seen, I now believe this is essential.)

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Rex Kerr
Rex Kerr

Written by Rex Kerr

One who rejoices when everything is made as simple as possible, but no simpler. Sayer of things that may be wrong, but not so bad that they're not even wrong.

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